Book of Hours
by cupid-painted-blind
Summary: It's not romantic, just necessary. / Mai and Ty Lee are caught in Azula's web. Mai/Ty Lee/Azula triangle with some twisted Mai/Zuko on the side.
1. i

**book of hours**

the light here leaves you lonely, fading  
as does the dusk that takes too long to arrive

Mai once heard a story about a princess who was cursed to sleep and sleep and sleep until her prince came to wake her up. She always thought it was terribly romantic.

* * *

It is not an auspicious beginning. Her parents are attending a ball, which she has been forced to join, although she isn't allowed to touch anything or dance with anyone or interfere in any way, so she sits - bored and lonely - by the drinks and people-watches, making up little stories in her head about them. There is Lao Xing, and he's madly in love with Lady Rei, who's married to Lao's brother. She's heard the whispered gossip, so she knows it's true, but she imagines the sorts of conversations they have when they're alone together: _Oh, Lady Rei, you're the most beautiful woman in all the land _and _Lao Xing, my darling_. She doesn't really know what comes next, but she knows that it's terribly scandalous.

Once, she mentioned these rumors and this curiosity to her mother, who simply scoffed and told her that Lady Rei was not to be imitated and that she should keep her mouth shut. _Girls are to be seen and not heard, Mai_, in that sharp tone.

As always, she had simply bowed low to the floor and begged for forgiveness, although she didn't really understand her crime.

At the ball, though, she wants desperately to scream it out at the top of her lungs, to just leap up onto the drinks table and cry that Lao Xing is having an affair with Lady Rei and they do things in back rooms when no one is watching. It would be terrible of her, and she almost does it, just to see what would happen, but then she remembers that cold, sharp voice her mother uses when she's done something wrong (which is always), and she sits very still and very quiet.

"What are you sitting here for?" a small voice asks, and she looks up into wide, gray eyes. "It must be boring."

"I'm not supposed to get involved with anything," she says, calling up the words her mother has drilled into her. "Girls are meant to be seen and not heard."

"Yeah, I heard that too," the girl replies simply, and holds out her hand, "but you're not being heard _or _seen sitting over here, are you?"

She stares at the girl's outstretched hand blankly. "What do you want me to do?"

"Dance!" she answers cheerfully.

"I'm not very good at dance." It's one of the (many) things that Mother hates about her - clumsy, _stupid _Mai can't even get a little dance right - and it's a very sensitive subject. The mere thought of going through the motions again makes her tremble with fear, and she almost recoils from the happy girl.

"That's okay," she says, like there's nothing written on Mai's face, "'cause it's not about being good. Didn't anyone ever tell you that?" The girl reaches forward and grabs Mai's hand, pulling her up from her safe little seat and dragging her across the floor. "Dance," she says triumphantly when they're in the very middle of the floor, "is about moving to music. I'm Ty Lee, by the way," she shouts over the strings beginning the next song, and takes her other hand. "What's your name?"

"Mai," she replies softly, and lets Ty Lee pull her through the motions of a simple dance.

* * *

"You and the youngest Hua girl seemed to get along nicely," Mother tells her. Mai bows as low as she can, until her forehead is touching the floor.

"I'm sorry, Mother, I know I wasn't supposed to get involved in anything."

"You weren't. But I suppose if you _must_," she says, dripping with venom, "at least it's good that you learned something. Get her to teach you dance steps," she adds flippantly, "since it seems like that's the only way you'll ever improve."

"Yes, Mother," she replies, and isn't sure if she's dismayed or elated.

* * *

"O-kay!" Ty Lee says brightly, clapping her hands and moving the band into position, "We are going to learn Noh Mai dance!" She turns and smiles at Mai. "I thought it would be good, because it's got your name in it. And it's not so hard to learn. Plus, it's the most awesome!"

Mai doesn't know how to react to Ty Lee and her ferocious idea of friendship - in her world, even though they've only known each other for a few days, she and Mai are the best of friends. Mai has never had a friend before, so she doesn't entirely know what it means. But she thinks that she rather likes Ty Lee, who is cheerful and eternally happy and chatters endlessly about whatever comes to mind. It's a nice change from the silence and the formality that she's used to.

"All right," she replies quietly, "how do we do this?"

"Well, in real Noh Mai dancing, there's all these _masks_ and _costumes _and stuff, but we don't have any of that, but they," she indicates to the startled and rather disgruntled-looking band, "will play the music. Right?" She turns innocently to the band members, who appear very uncertain of this plan, but also very afraid to tell either of the high-born children _no_.

"Um, of course," one of the percussionists says, "but I'm wondering if it's a good idea to begin with such a complicated..."

"It'll be _fine_," Ty Lee insists and, strangely enough, she's right. Either its the dance or the teacher or the lack of pressure, but Mai takes to this kind of dancing with ease and grace she didn't know she possessed. Ty Lee is positively giddy by the time they break for dinner, and even teases Mai a bit. "And you said you weren't good at dance. You liar!" But she's smiling, and Mai decides that she rather likes this friendship thing.

* * *

They meet Azula at a state dinner of some kind, and she immediately sets herself up as the leader of their little group. Ty Lee, Mai is dismayed to learn, is perfectly happy with this and treats Azula with the same bright cheer that she treats Mai with, and she finds herself jealous of the princess. Azula has everything; she can't possibly need Ty Lee the way Mai does.

But instead of speaking about it or even bringing it up, she does what she's best at, and swallows her anger, laying on a facade of carelessness that works on Azula because she isn't prepared for it and on Ty Lee because she isn't looking for it. After the third night of playing second fiddle to the princess, Mai goes home and seeks out one of her old hiding places, folding within herself and pretending that she doesn't exist. It works beautifully for about fifteen minutes, and then Mother calls the servants to find that daughter of hers and get her washed up and ready for bed.

She has half a mind to stay where she is and let them hunt, but it will be worse for her if she does, so she crawls out from under one of the guest beds and sneaks into the kitchen like she's been there the whole time.

"There you are," Mother says disdainfully, looking down her nose at her daughter the way she always does, the way that cries _why couldn't you be a son?_ or _why aren't you a firebender?_ Mother's eyes always whisper _not good enough _and her tone always speaks of barely-concealed disgust. Mai doesn't understand, and she wants desperately to make her mother love her, at the same time that she wants desperately to run away.

Ty Lee doesn't know that Mai's mother hates her, and Azula doesn't care. She feels horrifically alone in the world.

"Get out of here, won't you? You're not supposed to be here, you know that."

"I'm sorry, Mother," she whispers, the soundtrack of her childhood, "I was hungry."

"Well, you can't have anything," Mother replies coldly. "You know you aren't allowed to snack after dinner. I won't have a fat, ugly cow-hippo for a daughter."

Mai winces, and bites her lip hard to keep from crying.

* * *

She meets Zuko when she is eight and he is nine, and she thinks that maybe he will be his friend, now that Azula has stolen Ty Lee. He's friendly and handsome, but he's not cheerful like Ty Lee and he doesn't make the ghost of her home life go away like Ty Lee did in those first few weeks. Still, she recognizes something in him, the way he talks about his father mirroring the way she talks about her mother, and she wonders if they aren't alike after all.

Azula teases her for her apparent crush, but it's not a crush, not really. Zuko is nice to her, and Mai is starved for kindness, so she will do anything to keep Zuko liking her and treating her kindly. It's not romantic, just necessary.

And then Azula sets an apple on fire on top of her head and he barely speaks to her after that. This is the moment when Mai begins to _loathe _Azula.

* * *

Once - only once - when Mother's breath smells of wine and Father is off on a trip, when Mother screams so loud that the servants run to hide, leaving Mai alone to take the brunt of her anger, when Mai has failed to make a good impression on some faceless nobleman and his faceless son, she cries. Mother screams and rants and shouts and slaps her across the face several times, until she lays on the floor in a bundle and tries to make herself as small as she can and as unobtrusive as possible, and sobs.

When Mother finally slams the door and storms off into the depths of the house, Mai staggers to her feet and flees, all the way out of the house and past the gates, until she reaches Ty Lee's home. A servant answers the door and leads her in, surprised.

Three girls who look exactly like Ty Lee are standing in the drawing room when she's led in, but none of them seem to recognize her, and after all, they're too old to be her best (only) friend. She sits on one of the bouncy seats and feels strangely out of place, and she knows that she's a mess - her hair is loose and her eyes are red from crying and her clothes are rumpled. Ty Lee bursts through the doors and demands to know what happened, dragging her by the hand to her room which is - of course - pink.

Oddly enough, the pink silk sheets and the pink walls and the cheerful paintings of happy scenes calms Mai enough to talk. She tells Ty Lee everything about everything, about her Mother and her inability to please her and her hiding places and her not-crush on Zuko - everything except her hatred of Azula.

"We can take care of this," Ty Lee says earnestly, eyes full of sympathetic tears. "If you want... Azula can..."

"No, I don't want - don't make her get involved in this," she replies, although it almost comes out as _don't tell her my secrets_. Ty Lee nods and throws her arms around her shoulders.

"Okay. It's okay, Mai."

It's not, but she can believe it when Ty Lee says so.

* * *

A/N: This was originally a one-shot, but it got too long, so I divided it up into three parts; here is the first one.


	2. ii

**book of hours**

the world looks like us, mostly  
salt, dark water.

Even though it was almost a given that she would attend the Fire Nation Academy for Girls, it's Azula who makes the matter final. Ty Lee doesn't especially want to go - she talks about the circus and performance and dancing and _a life without rules, Mai, how awesome would that be?_ - but because Azula says she is going, she goes.

The Academy is opulent and grand, and they take lessons in dance and theatre and tea ceremony and etiquette. Azula takes lessons in political science and firebending and country-ruling, but neither she nor Ty Lee qualify for any of them. Listening to Azula rant about how she loathes all of her classes except firebending, though, Mai doesn't think she's missing much.

They don't share rooms at the Academy, but Ty Lee spends a lot of her time in either Azula's room or Mai's, which should have tipped her off that something was amiss - because Ty Lee would never let the chance to decorate a room all of her own pass her by - but it doesn't. Instead, she's grateful for the time spent alone or with Ty Lee (and, occasionally, Azula, who makes life interesting) and for the fact that her mother can't reach her here.

(She can, though, and she does, when Mai's scores falter and she is visited personally by her furious mother, telling her that she is not wasting all of this money and all of this time so that her daughter can fail here, and if she's going to be a useless lump of a daughter then she can do that at home and _is that what she wants?_ And Mai simply bows her head and apologizes - again - and insists that she will do better from now on, and then she goes back to her room and orders a set of knives.)

* * *

One night, several weeks after the incident with her mother, Ty Lee is in Mai's room and Azula is learning from some lecherous tutor about how to breathe properly.

"Did you ever want something different?" Ty Lee asks, and her face is uncharacteristically solemn. Mai glances at her, and then back to the knives she has just received.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," she says, rolling over and cocking her head, "did you ever wish you weren't nobility?"

There is no right answer. Yes, she has and at the same time, no, she hasn't. Nobility has been harsh on Mai and there are many, many things that she hates about it, but she doesn't know enough about the lower classes to say for certain that she has it worse than they. And if says that she does wish that she wasn't born to a noble family, then Ty Lee might include her in whatever has got her so agitated, but if she says that she doesn't, then Ty Lee might not, and Mai doesn't know which is worse.

She curls her hand into a fist around three of the oddly-shaped knives, enjoying the way they feel in her palm. "I don't know," she replies slowly. "Sometimes."

This is not the answer Ty Lee had hoped for, it seems. The other girl rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling, biting her lip. "I do," she says quietly. "I don't like it at all."

* * *

The next morning, Ty Lee has vanished. There isn't a note, or any obvious explanation. All of her clothes are still packed in the neat drawers of her un-decorated room, all of her valuables are still sitting right where she left them (scattered between her, Azula's, and Mai's rooms), and no one has heard anything from her since she left Mai's room the night before.

Azula is furious, but Mai is just sad. She should have known, and she should have done something, and she should have - a million other things. But she didn't, because she never does, because Mai cannot force herself to act on any of her emotions when she feels them (except once, when she cried and fled to her only friend).

"Why didn't she _say _anything?" Azula cries angrily, and it comes out more petulant than furious.

"I don't know," Mai replies softly, even though she thinks she does. But with Azula, it's best to let her burn herself up rather than get caught in her fire, so she stands aside demurely (like always) and allows the princess to shout and rage and throw things at the wall.

Meanwhile, she amuses herself with knives. Now that Ty Lee is gone, she has nothing else to do when she isn't in class or playing the part of Azula's dutiful puppet, so she takes to throwing the knives she's ordered against the wall, seeing how accurate she can become with them. It's part of an enjoyable game, but then Azula catches her doing it, and gets that strange look on her face she gets sometimes.

A week later, a whole giant package full of knives and _senbon _and holsters and bolts of the sort that crossbows use arrives at the Academy for her, and Azula marches up to her room and insists that she will learn how to use all of these instruments and more, because it's a good talent to have.

"Also," she adds, tugging Mai's robe from her shoulders and helping her place all of the weapons on her body, "I think it's best if we keep these a secret, at least for now, hmm?"

Mai's only response is to nod. She feels strangely powerful with all of these sharp objects hidden under her clothes. The knowledge that she can kill anyone around her at any time she so desires hits her like a brick one day during music class, and Mai almost smiles.

* * *

She receives a letter from Ty Lee about every month, in which she apologizes profusely for leaving on such short notice, and then spends the next three pages gushing about the circus and how much fun she's having and how many cool things she can do and how great it feels to perform. Mai keeps the letters, even though she knows it's kind of stupid, and rereads them on dark nights when her Mother has called on her to monitor her progress or Azula has insisted on seeing how she's coming with her knife-throwing exercises.

It's not quite like having her friend there, but it's close enough for now.

* * *

Everything changes in the summer after her twelfth birthday, when Azula is called home for some urgent reason. Mai doesn't join her, assuming that it's something minor or something that Mai has no control over. She's both eternally glad and forever angry that she didn't go with Azula.

When the princess returns, she goes straight to Mai's room, followed by an entourage of servants and guards, far more than she had before.

"Come on," Azula says sharply, "pack your things. We're done here."

"What?" Mai asks, thrown off-guard and incredulous. She wouldn't put it past it Azula to set up an elaborate joke just to mock Mai, but the princess raises an eyebrow in that special way of hers, that seems to say _I am not in the mood_.

"Pack. Your. Things," she repeats coolly. "I have to return to the capital and resume intensive training there, and I want _some_one I can trust guarding me there."

Mai opens and closes her mouth several times, but finally decides that now is not the time for questions, not when Azula is clearly agitated and no doubt looking for a fight. Instead, she nods curtly and begins packing, and the only thing she can think of is, _how will Ty Lee know to send her letters to the capital?_

It's a stupid thought, but it's all that comes to mind. She almost asks Azula, but she doesn't want her to realize how much those stupid, vapid letters mean to Mai - it's a weakness, and Mai knows enough of war and enough of Azula to keep her weaknesses hidden.

* * *

It isn't until she reaches the capital that she learns that Zuko has been banished, and Azula is now the heir apparent to the throne. It hits her like a slap to the face, and she feels alone in the world all over again, without Ty Lee and now without Zuko as well, it's just her and Azula, which really means it's just her.

She wants to know what he did, but she knows that she's not supposed to ask - _girls are to be seen and not heard_, after all, and now she's old enough that Mother won't accept any excuses for misbehavior. She must be perfect, every second of every minute of every hour of every day, and it's exhausting and terrible and she hates her life and she hates her mother and she hates Azula and she hates Ty Lee, even, for leaving and not taking her with her.

But mostly, she just misses the other girl. It's lonely here without her only friend.

Azula thinks she's missing Zuko, and Mai doesn't correct her. It's because of weakness and it's because there are things Azula doesn't need to know and it's because Azula thinks of Ty Lee as her property and Mai as her pet, and Mai is smart; she knows when not to rock the boat.

It takes three months for Ty Lee's next letter to reach her, and it demands to know why she's not at the Fire Nation Academy for Girls anymore and what's going on at the capital. Unfortunately, Azula reads it over Mai's shoulder, no doubt assuming that another is waiting for her back in her room or wherever Azula receives her letters.

"Lie," the princess says sharply, lips perilously close to Mai's ear, "tell her that your parents called you home. She doesn't need to know the truth."

But that calls up its own demons, because when Mai - dutiful, unobtrusive Mai - tells Ty Lee this, she reads between the lines. Her next letter is urgent and dire, begging her not to let her mother rule over her and brimming with well-wishing and hope for the best and insistence that if Mai ever needs to escape, Ty Lee can and will do whatever it takes to save her from the hell that is her mother's household.

She feels sick when she reads this letter. Mother, strangely enough, has been placid since she's been home - probably because of Mai's closeness with the princess - and her home life is now little more than boring. And Ty Lee is so worried and so genuine and it tears her heart up to read the sincerity in her best friend's letter.

Three days after she receives it, she sets it on fire so she won't have to face it anymore, and after that she stops writing Ty Lee altogether.

* * *

The next year, her mother gives birth to a baby boy, who they adore and coddle in a way that Mai is certain they never did her. She feels nothing for her little brother, although his big gray eyes haunt her and remind her that she had a friend, once.

That once, she wasn't this perpetually bored young woman with nothing to do but throw knives at the servants to see how fast they could run. Azula thinks she's fantastic now, but Mai hates who she's become. She hates the way Azula smirks at her and the way she's always goading her into being better at the knife-throwing and the way she treats her like a particularly docile pet. But years of conditioning have taught her how to keep hatred under control, and she puts this talent to use constantly.

Azula always stands a little too close and gets a little too warm and whispers a little too soft to be heard. She feels like a rabbit being hunted when she's around Azula, like she's the pet Azula is sharpening her claws on, and she wonders if this might be what drove Ty Lee to escape.

"You know, you're really beautiful," Azula says coldly, and Mai looks anywhere but at her.

* * *

And the worst part is - the absolute worst part - is that it's strangely gratifying, to be Azula's pet. Even as she loathes the princess, she finds that she's desperate to prove herself to her, and she hates herself for it.


	3. iii

**book of hours**

the storm lifts up the leaves  
why not sing?

When Omashu is conquered, Mai's parents are sent to govern the new city, against Azula's explicit wishes. Mai wonders if they've been sent because the Fire Lord thinks that Mai's father is the best choice for a governor or because the Fire Lord is worried about his daughter's interest in her gloomy old friend. Probably both.

Omashu is, if possible, more dull and dreary than even the capital. At least there, Azula was around to make things interesting and keep her on her toes. Even though she hates Azula with (almost) every fiber of her being, there's something incredible about her, something magnetic and inexorable, that keeps people (Mai) following her. She's beautiful and terrifying and unstoppable like a thunderstorm or a tornado, and Mai is caught in the tempest against her will. Ty Lee has escaped (a part of Mai hates her for this) but for how long?

It's only a matter of time, with Azula, until she gets exactly what she wants. And when it's Mai she wants, it's Mai she'll have, but when she recalls gray eyes and a cheerful smile, it'll be Ty Lee she hunts, and Ty Lee she'll trap.

She wishes that she could be there when that happens, either to save her friend or watch her get her comeuppance for _leaving Mai alone with Azula _she isn't sure.

* * *

Azula returns with Ty Lee only a few months later, and smiles in that way of hers, and Mai knows that she has been caught again in the princess's web, and she will again do exactly as Azula says for as long as Azula says it. She almost - almost - grabs Ty Lee by the arm and tells her to _flee _now, while she can still escape, that she will hold the princess off for as long as it takes for the other girl to escape because Ty Lee hates doing these things and she shouldn't be forced to play this game.

But Ty Lee _left _her at the Academy, and she didn't even say goodbye, or invite her along. So Mai simply folds her hands into her sleeves.

* * *

She does not care about Tom-Tom. She does not care about Tom-Tom. She does not care about Tom-Tom. She does not care about Tom-Tom. She does not care about Tom-Tom.

(Azula's voice in her ear; the mantra on repeat; the cold logic and the cold hatred and the cold lips on cold skin and the cold _Azula_ - )

But she doesn't care about her brother, so she back away and keeps the mad king instead of the tiny, helpless little child who thinks her hair is terribly fun to play with and who cries when she holds him because of all the knives under her sleeves and - and she does not care about her brother.

Ty Lee later looks at her like she's seeing her for the first time, and it almost kills her inside.

* * *

The next few months pass in a blur of earth and skin and sweat. Azula plays them both like the pets they are, and she always skirts just this side of vulgar - she seduces, but she does not take; she intices but she does not kiss. It scares Mai, and to escape Azula's web, she talks to Ty Lee about Zuko and her imagined crush on him, making up details as she goes because Azula's face and Azula's voice and Azula's lips haunt her nightmares now. To calm herself, she pretends that it's Zuko she dreams of, Zuko she wakes up in the night yearning for, Zuko's touch that burns like fire on her skin.

Ty Lee sees straight through her, but then, Ty Lee is suffering through the same thing, so they pretend together. Mai claims that it's Zuko - _I wonder if he's tall now _- and Ty Lee claims that it's the waterbender's brother - _Sokka, isn't he a cutie?_ - but the lie falls flat on the ground between them.

They belong to Azula, and they both know it. They can pretend, and flirt, and dream, and lie, but in the end, it all comes down to Azula, what she will and won't approve of, what she thinks and wants, what she says and does.

It's one of these nights that Mai decides she has finally had enough - of badevil_wrong_ dreams, of Azula's puppeteering, of her own inability to ever act on anything - and impulsively kisses Ty Lee. It's short and hard and filled with all of the mistakes and nightmares of a lifetime at Azula's side, but it says something that runs deeper than a kiss between best-friends-turned-more.

It says: I'm on your side.

It says: We're in this together.

It says: I don't want to be alone.

And Ty Lee just smiles and kisses her once more, but then pulls away. "It's a secret," she murmurs, and one hand slides up to Mai's neck. "Just between us."

"Just between us," Mai confirms.

* * *

Both Azula and Ty Lee encourage her all-wrong relationship with Zuko. Azula, in spite of her tempting and seduction, has set her eyes on Ty Lee, and Ty Lee proves impossible to read. She seems ecstatic that her best friend is (supposedly) happy and in love with her childhood not-crush, but Mai remembers a dark night in a warm tent and the lightest touch of soft lips, and wonders.

As for Zuko, he seems to know that it's all wrong, but he plays the part astonishingly well. There's something brewing under the surface, though, and she can't reach it, which frustrates her. In her time with Azula and Ty Lee, she's become exceptionally good at understanding and reading people - a necessity when you're the personal pet of the Princess Azula - and the fact that she can't read Zuko while she also suddenly can't read Ty Lee annoys her more than it should.

He _should _be easy to manipulate. Everyone else is. But he's _not_, and she _can't_, and they fall into a self-destructive dance of a relationship that drains her as much as it builds her up.

"You know this isn't going to work, don't you?" he says softly, lips on her shoulder. In a sickening irony, she's imagining that they're Azula's.

"I know," she replies shortly, "but it's better than nothing."

"Is it?" he asks, but doesn't expect an answer.

The truth is - _no_. But the truth is also that this facade calms everyone; the Fire Nation relaxes in knowing that the crown prince is well on his way to a stable future with a suitably noble wife, the Fire Lord relaxes in knowing that said suitably noble wife won't be running off with his daughter instead of his son, Mai's mother relaxes in knowing that her failure of a daughter has finally accomplished something worthwhile. The only people who aren't calmed are the two people _in _the relationship.

It's all right, then, for the moment, to play the game.

He's good at heart, she realizes, and understands finally why Azula hates him so much. He is everything she isn't, and thus he is everything that Mai isn't, and she'd be lying if she said that didn't sting a little to know. Mai has never asked for much - just contentment, just to avoid Mother's anger - and Mai has always known where she stands in this strange, messed-up world, but just this once, with too-good Zuko's arms around her and lies swirling about her head and images of too-red lips and a seductive smile playing in her mind, she wishes that she was someone else.

Maybe she could be whoever it is that Zuko is thinking of as he touches her, or maybe she could be Ty Lee with her circus-girl dreams, or maybe she could be some random nobody from nowhere with no purpose in life but to live. That would be nice, she thinks.

"Not really," she answers finally, to his rhetorical question, "but it's all we've got."

He doesn't reply.

* * *

Three days later, he's gone and she's surprised with how much it hurts.

Ty Lee sneaks into her room and hugs her that night, murmuring apologies and understanding and hope and wishes and _it'll all be okay_-s, and, as always, she believes it because it's Ty Lee who's saying it.

As she pulls away from the hug, though, in that split-second between together and not, right when everything is just about to change, Azula bursts through the door, eyes blazing with something like hurt, and she begins ranting and screaming about Zuko telling their Father something he wasn't supposed to, and _I did everything for him_, and now her father doesn't trust her and it's all wrong and everything's wrong and -

And then she looks at Ty Lee and seems to see something written on her face, and goes silent.

She tilts her head quizzically, and brings a hand up to her mouth, and everything is over, then.

* * *

Mai visits the Boiling Rock prison, ostensibly to talk to Zuko, but really to avoid Azula. Both of them haunt her, and she wants to lay at least one of her demons to rest now, while she can.

But when she gets there and sees him all she thinks is how hurt she felt when he was gone and it meshes with how hurt she felt when Azula stole Ty Lee from her and when Azula cocked her head in that horribly understanding way and when Azula breathed commands in her ear, and all she can do is lash out. It's not about him, not really. It never was.

But it's all she's got, and that's all Zuko has ever been - the consolation prize, the all-wrong nightmare woven from her sweetest dreams - and it's unfair to him because he's better than this, and he deserves so much more, but she's all he's got, so she'll have to do. And right now, she can play the part of the angry ex-girlfriend because she is the angry ex-girlfriend, although whether it's Ty Lee or Azula who has dumped her, she can't say.

It's not Zuko. It's never been.

She helps him escape, though, because he does deserve better than that, and because it's a really, incredibly delicious revenge against the princess. Unfortunately, Azula catches her in the act.

It's all she's ever feared, coalescing into one terrible moment: Azula's eyes are mad with betrayal and jealousy and something else underneath, her hand is raised to bring about the lightning, and she alone in the world.

And then Ty Lee makes her choice, and Mai can do nothing but stare. As they're dragged away, Ty Lee looks at her with tears in her eyes and says, "Just between us, right?" in this small, hoarse voice. Mai tries to reach out and touch her, but her hands are tied and the guards are much stronger and bigger than her, so she has to settle for an expression of utmost appreciation.

It feels foreign on her face, but for Ty Lee, she will do anything.


End file.
